need help booting up

This is a discussion on need help booting up within the Tech Board forums, part of the Community Boards category; hey a friend of mine called me up , they have a laptop running windows xp home
when the start ...

need help booting up

hey a friend of mine called me up , they have a laptop running windows xp home

when the start it up it just goes to a black screen and stops

i had her try going in through safe mode and it would print out some things and it would just stop too (printed out driver info and stuff)

then just to try to save a file she wanted i had her use a win 98 boot disk to get to a promts so i could get to the c drive and save her file to a floppy but the c drive had nothing on it only the files that the diagnostic files that the boot disk put there

so i figured that it moved the c back to d but i couldnt get into d

anyone have any ideas it seems like somehow the hard drive lost its partitions or something

she had gone through a plane security thing since the last time it worked i guess that could have screwed it up but it seems very unlikely ,people go through them every day without problem

i know i can just reinstall everything but anyone have any ideas whats wrong or how i can fix it without reinstalling windows

so i can get some files back, other then taking the hd out and puting it in another comp or using a knoppix type disk and trying to recover data

similar problem

i have a very similar problem to this so i thought id ask my wuestion here rather than start a new thread. when i start the computer it brings up something about being not being shut down properly. i ran a help line and they said to put in the windows xp cd, then when it gets to the install section (and something to do with partitions) i should give you the option to click r for repair, but it doesnt so im stuck. aso would setting up a bot disk from a working xpmachine work, and if you think it would then how do i create one. thank you in advance.

question

i thought doing that would make me lose all my files. would you mind explaining to me exactly how i re-instal windows xp (i assume that is what you mean) without losing everything. im not exactly the best when it comes to computer jargon.

Stick the disk in. Boot. It should give you an option to install with or without format. Install without format. Make sure you put it in the same location and that you don't change the file system. (ie. don't change to FAT if you're using NTFS and vice versa) I can't guarantee that none of your files will get overwritten, but in most cases they won't. BTW, I assume no responsibility if you F this up.

hi there i am not going to do the things you said as i dont want to f up my computer lol. but using google i found a site that gave details of how to fix my problem. only thing now though is that when i start the computer and cllick on "start windows normally" it gives me a message saying

"windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \windows\system32\config\system anyone got any idea what is hould do next?.................................

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